Staggered Contracts, Market Power, and Welfare

Luis Cabral

No 10095, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: I show that exclusive, staggered supply contracts can decrease industry competition when there are economies of scale: buyers pay a higher price to the incumbent seller and the expected value received by an entrant seller is lower when contracts are staggered. Moreover, under staggered contracts there may exist equilibria where an inefficient firm forecloses a more efficient one. Given that contracts are staggered, contract length further increases market power; however, increasing contract length may also eliminate the inefficient foreclosure equilibrium. Finally, I show that, allowing firms to choose contract structure endogenously, the resulting equilibrium path features staggered contracts.

Keywords: Dynamic competition; Exclusion; Staggered contracts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L12 L41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cta and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10095 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10095

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10095

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().